I looked at data from 272 law departments that had participated so far in this year’s the GCM benchmark survey (with full data) and the 114 that identified their matter management system. Having described the dispersion of those named systems as well as the eight most common (See my post of June 13, 2011: 63 departments in total), I went a step further with the 63 users of the “big eight.” I calculated the total legal spending as a percentage of revenue (Revenue Spend) for each of those 63 legal departments and then by software package.

For all 272 companies, the average was 0.85 percent while the median was 0.40 percent. For all but one of the software packages, average Revenue Spend was less than the average for the entire group. (When I removed those 63 from the group, the averages and medians hardly budged.}

Conclusions will become stronger as hundreds more law departments take part in the survey, but from this preliminary analysis, one could argue that these well-known matter management systems help their users reduce their total legal spend as compared to the average of law departments that have not chosen to license one of them.